Last year, Thomas Allen was one of 70 artists chosen to decorate the halls of two buildings - The Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center and a tower of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was asked to select two books from a list of cherished children's stories and make a series of positive and uplifting photographs inspired by them. One of the books he selected was one of my favorite childhood reads, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Rather than just use the book itself, Allen looked to other books to bring the story to life.

"For The Phantom Tollbooth, I brought 6 of the book’s many personified idioms to life by crafting the characters from the surfaces of other books and ephemera that spoke of their essence," he says on his website. "For example, Spelling Bee appears to emerge and hover above a spelling dictionary while the Mathemagician stands atop a tower of flashcards, with a confident art raised skyward as if to say, 'A solution to any problem can be found.'"